Monday, December 14, 2015

Shirley Rivas, Final Reflection

I took this course on a whim in order to satisfy my hunger for feminism and as a Latina, I was interested to learn more about Chicana history. I knew that oral histories was at the crux of this course, but looking back, I really did not know what I was getting myself into. This course was extremely interdisciplinary and it really made for a demanding experience where we were actually learning knew content, and then being asked to engage and execute action on our newfound knowledge. This idea of putting what we learn in a course to actually come up with a final product that is a part of something as revolutionary as Chicana por mi Raza was truly not what I was expecting, it was much more.
            For one, the idea of creating history was unprecedented idea to me because as far as I knew, all types of histories must be recorded one way or another, right? However that may be true, I found out soon into the course that there are some histories that are widely accepted and one’s that are not. For this particular project, we were asked to not only record the history of a Chicana woman residing in the Midwest, but also scan and make digital copies of their own personal archives. Through talking during class time and really understanding the impact we were creating in the realm of history making, I was dismayed to realize that there are truly some people who would not find this type of work either important or legitimate. This has partly to do with the women themselves; many of these women are not easy to find on a Google search and many of them have not had people previous to us interested in the work they have done in the Chicana movement. It is disheartening to come to terms with the reality of this situation because as I have come to find out, all of these women have an important history to tell and many of them have kept large amounts of records to substantiate their history.
            The women that have taken part in the Chicana por mi Raza project are women that have taken part in the Chicana movement and have collected items related to the movement. But in reality, they might not have collected these items thinking one day it would be important to someone studying Chicano/a history. They may have collected items and taken/kept photographs for their own use, much like a keepsake, to remember about this time where they were fighting for the rights of their people. Since the Chicana movement is a history that many have not taken a want to record/preserve, these women’s items have remained in their basements, closets, drawers, and more of the usual suspects. It might not have been until we entered their homes that these items have finally touched the light. Not only are we taking an interested in seeing their archives, but we are just as interested in preserving their archives in a digital form! The point of making digital and having it assessable at basically any given computer/laptop is not only a unique form of history making, but it is also a unique subject matter. These women are at this unique position of having their histories finally being told and the items that seemed to only take up space in their homes are now substantiated from a historical standpoint.
            As far as the actual actions involved with the recording, gathering, scanning, and so forth involved with constructing someone’s history, it was all less intuitive that I had imagined it to be. Especially since the course at first glance seems to just heavily rely on recording what these women tell us about their own history and their involvement with the Chicana movement, I was really surprised to find out all of the “additional” work that needed to be put forth. To start, recording someone’s oral history is not as simple as recording off of one’s iPhone. Not that I thought we were going to record using our iPhones, however, using the recording and lighting equipment from the ISS Media Center was more than I had bargained for. The actual camera had many components from putting the cameras on the proper settings and setting up the microphone to our particular Chicana, Juana, Professor Cotera who was conducting the interview, and setting up the Zoom recorder. Not to mention the fact that the oral history recording is just a fraction of the work that goes into creating their history.
Additional to the oral history, we had to collect items to scan and put into our digital archive in Medici (let me tell you, learning and mastering Medici could be a course all in its own). Juana had items scattered around her home that we deemed important to scan/document and we did all of the scanning and picture taking the time we were there. This helped with allowing us to have plenty of more time post-interview to catalog all of her items. This process is really time consuming because it requires knowledge of the item itself and knowledge on using Medici and the format of the Excel worksheet for this project. Although it was all very labor intensive, I am really glad to have had that experience because I was really given the opportunity to see what all goes into creating an accessible history from scratch. There were many times where we had to go back and tweak things here and there (an we continue to do so), but overall, it was great to see our hard work take true form. Professor Cotera really is not joking when she says that this project really has no true ending.

Through this project, I was able to put my love for feminism and social justice together in a really unique way. These women’s histories are not superficially important to most because the Chicana movement is not something taught inside most public schools, but once you dig deeper, you realize that everyone’s histories have the potential to be “important,” it just comes down to who has the power to create these histories in an accessible way. Through this course, we did something about the systemic exclusion of a few women’s histories and us students were given the power to create history. This was a great privilege because not everyone is empowered to take part in history making. Through this project, we are not only giving the spotlight to these women, but we are also paving the way for a new generation of history making and inclusion.

Ramiro Alvarez, Exit Reflection

I knew, roughly and loosely, that history, or should I say History™, was a bit of a mess, to say the least, before taking AMCULT 498. Most of what I knew and was learning in “progressive” spaces, however, was how history was inaccurate; the facts didn’t line up with what “actually happened.” A lot of this was common sense—Columbus did not discover the Americas—and a lot of it was adding historical sound bites back into the mix of larger stories, for example I have seen efforts to add more information into already existing timelines of slavery, women’s rights, and indigenous rights as a way of “correcting history.” These historical sound bites, as I called them, in a way reified the white man’s timeline by acknowledging some sort of legitimacy to it, even as more information was added to them. This information I’m referring to can be anything from more direct quotes from non-white figures that were there—for example, inserting into the white man’s timeline a sleuth of subversive Harriet Tubman quotes—or something like uncovering more factual specificity to how bad Native Americans were bing treated. In other words, the facts of white history were challenged for what they left out, but they weren’t challenged for how their memory practices were built to leave people out, to pacify and subdue radicals like Tubman, and to focus on facts.
            There was definitely a hollow feeling to this method of correcting history. Why do we need such factual accuracy to convince people in 2015 that our ancestors suffered in parallel ways to how we suffer today? When will we stop? Until we’ve recovered every single fact in obscured history? Volumes and volumes of corrective history can be written, but when will people get around to reading it and internalizing it? All of these questions swarmed my already anxious and cracked understanding of how I would help save the world. And while I had a feeling that an emphasis of factual history was the wrong route to take to save our collective memory, I did not really understand how white supremacy had hijacked our understandings of “subjective” and “objective.” What sounded to me like two forces that can exist in balance like the poles of North and South do, looked more like a harsh binary where both ends were mutually exclusive and fixed, with objectivity as the true, proper, and more valuable piece. It seems common sense to me now, but all it took to interrogate this notion was asking, who is making the history and who is calling their bias interpretation objective?
            I remember mentioning once in class that the extent of what I knew about history production was grade school history textbooks. The only exposure I had to this field of history reunification was through the banned books cases and conservative, white supremacist history text book debates taking place in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. I had never once considered how even something like a PBS documentary is a form of history creation. Adding to that list, now I understand how historical journals, museums, documentaries, holidays, organizations, art, etc., all embody a role in history creation. But if these institutions are not getting their information from textbooks or their own research, where is it coming from? In comes the archive.
            About two years before taking this class I had visited the Bentley Historical Library on North Campus to poke my nose around some of the collections made for Latinx student organizations. I went with the intention of coming out with lists of worthy material to incorporate into the project I had at hand during that time. I went in with the intention of spending a couple of hours at the archive, sure, but a satisfying couple of hours nonetheless. Wow, was I in for a surprise.
            From my understanding, the Bentley’s archive is like many archives in protocol and safety measures, and that is exactly my issue. For one, two hours there still had me empty-handed. Second of all, the organization of the material was not enough for me to search productively; it was clear that an online search engine style of research was going to have me going in circles and I needed to start thinking like an archivist, but where would I get that training other than trial and error?
            Eventually after three visits, I got the hang of it and my project was complete. However, I walked away from that experience with a sour taste in my mouth. If this building closes when most people are getting out of work, who is this here for? If it takes hours to find one piece of relevant information, who is this here for? If the finding aides aren’t as intuitive as one would think, who is this here for? If it takes a team of people and a very large building to call yourself an archive, who can realistically reproduce this?
The archive is alive and well for the wealthy, the elite, and the knowing. It is because of these inaccessible qualities that we get that difficult feedback loop where those interrupting the archive are those very same minds and bodies that are appraising what goes in the archive in the first place. The archive then becomes synonymous with maintenance, validation, and reification of and for existing methods of history creation and distribution. The archive then merely functions as the sandbox for oppressive reality creation that can’t be refuted because “it’s in the archive,” in other words, it’s objective truth.
            What I have learned in this class is that “correcting” history is an endless battle if we do not eliminate the possibility for more misinformation to be created. I am not suggesting we abolish archives, but that we transition to a style of memory upkeep that is genuinely guiding us to a healthy future; the creation of a “living” and communal archive that does not seek permanence, but is permanent in the ways we are constantly interacting with it as something we need—because at the end of the day I still believe societies need a sort of archive, especially in the age of mass information and hyper-visibility.
Much like how self-awareness functions in humans, where the past serves as an enormous pool of valuable lessons if interpreted honestly and wholly, the “living” archive can serve that purpose of inspiration for new creation, new ideas, new ways of living that are reflective of the lived past, not the “past” embedded in dates and facts, as those components of history are static and therefore not ideas, something that by definition is constantly dynamic.
            This is reflective of how I want to live my life. I do not want to live with a linear understanding of myself or my people that cuts us up between identity labels and “successes.” I want to be ever evolving, preserved only in the moment, and inspired by both the surreal nature of what has happened and the uncertainty of what can happen. But with this current placement of the archive, I cannot connect with that inspiration. At all. The future seems predictable; after all, the feedback loop is predictable. The past seems dead and not worthy of exploration, just veneration, and that is also uninspiring for it is prescriptive and therefore not authentic to whom I am.

I walk away from AMCULT 498 with a reignited love for the Chicana movement. But what I carry out of this experience more than anything is inspiration in the form of constant re-envisioning as praxis. Is that not what growth is? I leave the constant pressure to understand myself factually and embrace the possibility to understand myself abstractly, poetically, and alive, even if that isn’t as “satisfying” or as easy to communicate to others as facts are. Factual fixation is something to unlearn from this white supremacist culture and I thank Maria and her class for getting me started on that lifelong endeavor.
When I walked into this class in September, I was entirely unfamiliar with both the historical background of Chicana feminism and the methods for collecting oral histories and developing this project. Now, just a few months later, I cannot believe how far I have come. This class is so unlike any class I have ever taken before. As a pre-med student, I am used to big lecture halls and long exams. A class of only seven people working on an archive about a topic I knew nothing about actually seemed quite scary to me because I had no idea what to expect.

Over the course of the semester, learning about Chicano activism opened my eyes to the way history is portrayed in the mainstream. I had never heard of things like the blowouts or the Denver Youth Conferences before. Throughout middle and high school, textbooks never mention these monumental events, and this is entirely unfair to young students. They are taught to see a certain side of history as the truth instead of molding together multiple stories to create an inclusive and more accurate history. Based on the lack of Chicanas in the textbooks I grew up reading, it appears that Chicanas have rarely, if ever, done anything of historical significance. It is obvious that this is not true, but without learning about them in history classes, many young students would never know the differences that they have made in society. Marie and Lizette discussed during our last class period how the lack of narratives of Chicanas leaves young girls without any role models. Often times, people do not realize what they have the power to do if they do not see examples of it. Chicana Por Mi Raza has the ability to inspire people to make changes in society. The public website is available to anyone to learn about influential women whom they’ve probably never heard of before. It is so important for people to have resources like this to see that it is not just white people or men who have made lasting impacts on society.

This course also taught me more than I ever thought I’d know about the process of archiving materials and recording history. I had never even visited an archive until we went to the Bentley, and I definitely had never filmed a person’s oral history before. At first, it was really hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we were going to look at boxes of a woman’s collection, decide what was important enough to save, upload it to a digital archive, and display parts of it on a public website along with a short description of the woman’s life that we would create. To me, this huge responsibility seemed overwhelming. How was I at all qualified to decide what of this woman’s belongings was relevant to a movement I’d never heard of? How was I qualified to write another person’s biography? Fortunately, as we worked through the semester, I found that I was gaining enough knowledge about the movement to be comfortable doing these things.

When the time came for our mid-semester biocuration assignment, I realized that writing a short biography wasn’t that scary, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the responsibility. I only watched seven clips, each about ten or fifteen minutes long, but I felt like I knew a lot about Gloria Arellanes, the woman whose CPMR page I was assigned to work on. She was sharing intimate details of her life and telling funny or shocking stories that I wouldn’t soon forget. Writing her biography made me feel connected to her even though I had not and probably never would meet her. As a group of both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse backgrounds and with very different life experiences, I think we were each drawn to a different person for this assignment. I chose to watch Gloria’s oral history and write her biography because we had learned that she was involved in a free clinic in Los Angeles. As someone who is very interested in medicine and public health, I found it inspiring to see how Gloria, a woman without any background in the medical field, helped her community gain access to better health care and became very respected by the larger public health facilities and hospitals. Gloria’s achievements go far beyond El Barrio Free Clinic, and I am honored that I got to share part of her life story on a public platform so that she may inspire others and get some of the recognition that she deserves.

Eventually, after all the training with the camera equipment and Final Cut Pro, I felt prepared to conduct Juana Gonzales’s oral history with Shirley and Katelynn. This was a difficult interview, and the process was truly a team effort. We were also in a bit of a time crunch because Juana wanted to finish the interview by three o’clock, and she had a lot of material to scan and take pictures of. Despite the difficulty of the interview, I am grateful that Juana invited us into her home to share parts of her life. The experience showed me that conducting an oral history will never be exactly what you expect. Everyone reacts differently to being filmed, and it can be a lot of work to make someone comfortable talking about themselves in front of a camera.


At the beginning of the year, I could not envision exactly what people would do with our work. I knew that scholars would use the archive for their research, but I wasn’t sure who would be looking at our public website. As I learned more about the project, it was exciting to see how the website would allow anyone to learn about these women’s contributions to the Chicano movement and their work toward women’s equality. I had not realized that this material could also be used in art until Maria told us that one of her students created a play based on women featured in the archive. There are so many different ways that the archive and website can aid others in their studies, their art, and filling gaps in history. I’m so glad I got to be a part of this unique experience because I got to contribute to the historical narrative of our country.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

Blake Ebright Reflection #2

A few semesters ago, I took a course about the Global Feminisms Project. The Global Feminisms Project (GFP) is an archive of oral histories about Indian, Nicaraguan, Polish, Chinese, Mexican, and American women in activism and scholarship. As I said in my previous blog post, that course left me with little to no experience with the actual archive itself or with archival processes. Knowing what I know now about Chicana por mi Raza, I would compare the two sites as “New Age Archives,” or as Professor Cotera has called Chicana por mi Raza (CPMR), a Digital Memory Collective. I think CPMR is a little more accessible because it has actual archival documents on the bibliography pages of the women whose oral histories we’ve provided. However, CPMR is limited to a specific part of the globe and does not provide the full interviews the way GFP does.

I am walking away from this course with two pretty important, but unintended, consequences. I’ve learned more about film production than I had ever imagined I would in my time as an undergraduate. I’ve taken this information multiple times this semester and I’ve applied it to my honors thesis in Psychology (in my experiment, I am showing subjects a recording of a research assistant pretending to be a subject in a study, then figuring out whether the subjects empathize with the research assistant based on the difficulty of the task). I’ve also learned a great deal about archiving. Not only have I gained an understanding of the process and the concept of an archive, but I’ve also gained an appreciation for the importance of the archives themselves and respect for the archivists working on them.

Speaking of the time we spent learning about archives, I believe our first theoretical discussion about why archives are necessary, what makes an archive, and whether CPMR is an archive happened in the Bentley. I have to admit, I was excited and simultaneously wary of the course up until that point. Since then, I’ve loved incorporating abstract thought into our learning about the concrete (and in the case of the website, the non-concrete).  This brings me back to another point from my first post; the practice of oral history as a marginalized form of knowledge. The Feminist Thought and Latina Oral History curricula both spoke to the idea of “capital H” History and the history of great men. This kind of history perpetuates the marginalization of those already disregarded by those in power while their histories are still being written.

On a seemingly unrelated note, we used Paris is Burning in Feminist Thought to discuss the repercussions of making marginalized groups more visible. For our Chicanas in the 21st century, I think it isn’t something that we should necessarily worry about, but something we should be conscientious of as a fact of the past. Within two years of the release of Paris is Burning, all but one of the featured characters in the documentary about Harlem drag balls had been killed in a hate crime or died of an AIDS-related illness.

Returning to the topic of incorporating abstract theory into our learning about archives, I felt as though the class had been properly capped off by our discussion and readings for the last week of class, in which we discussed the legacy and purpose of archives. The free-write was especially helpful in creating our own conceptualization of the issues at hand. Are our histories more protected once they’re actually created? We’re not writing histories of great men, which undoubtedly makes the collection of the history harder, but who does this serve and when do we know we’ve made an important offering? Can we reasonably fly under the radar and get away with saying what we want to say, the “lowercase t” truth? These micro histories concern the patriarchy and the oppressed groups’ advances not only in spite of it, but also their advances against it. Thus, this is the most precarious kind of history to create and back up.

By asking for the memories of the oppressed, those who have been silenced for such a long time, we’re serving the agents of change – be it those who critically witness and work on the histories and then are inspired to do something more in realms of embodied practice, be it the agents who have already attempted change so many years ago (regardless of their success) or maybe just people watching our (published) product. By lending agency to the agents of change-to-be and the agents of the past, does that automatically give them authority? Who can claim authority or shared authority and at what point? If the “archive” is only the process of making the archive, then the ultimate product doesn’t matter anymore – is that ok? We shift the idea of the archive to make the experience of the creator-interpreter the most important thing. Once the experience of creating the archive is the most important thing, is the archive done serving? What more can we ask of it?

On the flip side of archives serving as inspiration tools, I wonder if the archive can be trusted as more than just the enlightening process itself. If history is interpretation of memory, where does that leave us, the creator-interpreters with oral history? Our act of creating a collection and deciding what to archive is inherently an interpretation of the original space. Why are we allowed to put ourselves on a non-interpreter, non-great men, non-etc. pedestal when we, backed by the “great men,” given our authority by working within the oppressive regime, come into a space and create the illusion that we’re letting memories run wild, regardless of their historical accuracy?

We go back to the lab and fix what has been said, present what we want to present, and interpret it through tags and collections and digging through our own lenses. Even with training against bias and against specific lens-using, we are subjects of the history of great men and the society built around them. Is that ok? It’s the best we can do. Are we historian non-historians who add the experience of the archive as our two cents to the interpretation of the item presented? Regardless, we can only do all of this under the auspices of great men, however passive their support is. That is to say, whether it’s financial backing or simply turning a blind eye, if the patriarchy did not want these oral histories reported, they would not be reported. Does that silent acceptance protect us from repercussions of the more indignant great men? Might the great men now claim the history that we uncovered in spite of them, the way they have so many times before? Maybe we should let them claim the history – that may protect the project from invisibility.


I’d like to end on a less cynical note. I’ve talked before about whether it’s important for the archive of the archive to be removed from the archival materials. From what I’ve seen, and written above, this can’t be too important. Like I said, we’re constantly affecting and interpreting the original memories, which turns it all into the “history” of “oral history” (as opposed to just oral memories). It’s exciting, though, that it isn’t its own. It’s exciting that it’s malleable, impermanent, and that everyone can take from it what they will, what they need, and what they can. I concluded my first post with the “hope to be further inspired and prepared to make my own oral history project, perhaps related to the local LGBTQ community.” While I find myself no more, and no less, inspired to take on that daunting task, I’m as inspired as ever to have these theories inform my practice of feminism and to, in turn, allow my practices to inform my theory: a feminist praxis.

Marie Dillivan - Reflection 2

           
            This semester in Latina Oral Histories, I have learned about many different topics that somehow all related together in the Chicana por mi Raza project. To sort through everything that we’ve done this semester, I’m going to start with the beginning. The most important thing that I learned at the beginning of this course was about archives which had been something that I had previously never really thought about. Archives are a part of the history that we learn that is almost invisible to students throughout most of their education, but the important thing that I learned about archives is that they are not unbiased or untouched representations of history. What goes into an archive is chosen and it is chosen from a specific set of people. Therefore, many important parts of our history are not included in an archive and this is where public projects to collect oral histories like CPMR come into the picture. What I learned about oral histories is that they have the potential to provide a picture of a part of history that has not been sorted through or edited by an archivist, but rather this picture is provided by an individual who participated in the history. Although this picture is still biased and based on the experience of one person, the oral history gives that one person the authority to tell their history in their own way, which I think is something that cannot be achieved through most conventional history-telling methods. Finally, what I learned about “History” is that it is chosen and it is chosen by those in a position of power to reflect what they wish to show about history. I have thought about this before, but I hadn’t thought about it very much in regards to the histories of social movements.
            Next in this class, I learned so much about Chicana feminism, and feminism in general which was one of my hopes for this class since I have never taken another women’s studies class. One of the most important things that I learned from our discussions of history and Chicana feminism is that it is barely present in the literature and materials about mainstream feminism. Before this class, I could have watched the Maker’s documentary from PBS and not thought too much about the question, “Where are the women of color?” because the documentary does briefly address the activities of colored women related to the movement. The fact that the documentary addresses women of color in the way that it does may lead a viewer to believe that that’s the whole story; that’s all there is to women of color feminism. However, we know that this is not true, and histories told in this way erase the activities of Chicana feminism. I enjoyed learning about the Chicana feminists in our class and how they sought to carve out a position for themselves when a space didn’t exist for them in the Chicano movement or in the mainstream feminist movement. I also enjoyed looking at how these women related to one another as they dealt with challenges from the men in their culture, the women in the mainstream movement, and the rest of the oppressive forces as well. I particularly enjoyed learning about Carmen Tafolla in her oral history interview and from her archive. She was an amazing young and she is still amazing today. She is someone that I will always remember as working hard and finding success while fighting against the forces that tried to hold her back.
            Another important part of this class that I enjoyed was the working with the woman who we interviewed, Ana Luisa Cardona, and her materials. The experience of going to Ana’s house and interviewing her was very special and I think that I learned a lot about what truly goes into an oral history and how to conduct one. It was a truly enjoyable experience, and I’m really happy with how her oral history turned out and her archive on Medici is looking great. This also makes me excited to keep working with her materials next semester and keep adding to her archive. This experience provides real life examples to the things that you always hear: that everything doesn’t go as planned and you have to be flexible.
            This class also made me think about and be more critical of all types of histories and made me appreciate the work that goes into trying to remedy the errors of “History”. There is an incredible amount of work that could be done in this area with many types of people and groups that are traditionally left out of history, and I think that any work toward allowing those people to tell their history is valuable. The experience of collecting a history and incorporating it into a space that can make it accessible to others is very unusual since we don’t usually think of history as happening in this way. When we grow up we don’t think of ourselves as being a part of history or a part of forming history, but we can do that. That’s the importance of the process of this project. We can be a part of it, and it is important work. To me, one of the most important parts of this project in general is just expanding the potential for access to those who are interested to learn about these women and this movement that is not well documented in traditional “History” sources. It is important to me that someday young people could look up “chicana feminists” and they could find this website where they can see all of these women and their accomplishments and contributions in a way that they otherwise may have not been able to.

            About myself, I have learned that I should always be more critical and that I’m interested in the potential of projects like Chicana por mi Raza both in regards to the product that they create and its value for others but also for the experience that students can get from this type of project, which I know is an important component. I’m interested in increasing access to stories like these which doesn’t surprise me but what surprised me was that I feel that this somehow relates to my one of my other serious interests which is increasing health equity and access to health care for Latinos and other groups. Increasing access to a group’s history I feel is an important component for overall wellbeing. For groups that have been historically marginalized, being able to see their history told in this way could be a very important positive influence. I see an important relationship here, and that is a very important thing that I learned through this experience.